Review: Love My Life

Posted by Kevin Ouellette on August 26, 2008 6:25pm EDT (4 years ago)

If the poster art for Koji Kawano’s Love My Life featuring the two main characters about to kiss didn’t clue you in, the first scene of them exchanging a piece of hard candy back and forth between their mouths should. It is in fact a lesbian romantic drama based on a manga by Ebine Yamaji. The film focuses mostly on a girl named Ichiko (Rei Yoshii) and her relationship with girlfriend Eri (Asami Imajuku) as they deal both with typical relationship issues and the added stresses of being lesbians in an intolerant society. Nothing too earth-shattering here; it’s just a saccharine sweet tale of young love and minor hardships with an upbeat theme.

The film begins with the aforementioned make out scene and a subsequent conversation in which Ichiko considers coming out to her father. Eri seems pretty confident that Ichiko’s dad will be accepting of the choice, in contrast to her own father’s closed-mindedness, but Ichiko is still nervous about it. As it turns out Eri couldn’t have been more right; Ichiko’s father (Ira Ishida), an uber hip novel translator, barely seems fazed by the news. In fact he immediately breaks into small-talk with Eri and finds a plethora of reasons to like her. Later, as Ichiko takes a walk with her dad, we find out why. He suddenly blurts out that he’s gay and so was her mother. They were best friends who decided to get married specifically to have a child. Ichiko’s mother had passed away 8 years earlier, so hearing this news about her parents for the first time is particularly shocking. However, finally being able to get that secret out in the open after so many years seems to be a huge load off her father’s shoulders and from this point on he becomes a main source of support and advice for Ichiko, along with her closeted best friend Take-chan (Issei Takahashi).

Ichiko and Eri share a playfully romantic relationship, but they actually have completely opposite personalities. Eri is a serious and introspective law student driven by the idea of proving her dad wrong, while Ichiko is a little more on the flighty emotional side. Various minor setbacks occur, such as Ichiko’s brief infatuation with a mohawk-sporting customer at the record store she works at, but these end up being nothing more than bumps in the road and are dealt with quickly and honestly without much excessive drama. When Eri decides she needs to take a break from the relationship and be alone until her finals are over, Ichiko takes it really hard. She has to be talked down by both her father and Take before the break ends and Eri finally gets a chance to express her feelings in a way she had never been able to before.

As the title suggests, “Love My Life” is a cute, relatively stress-free movie that sacrifices contrived turmoil for everyday realism. The lack of any significant conflict—save Eri’s straitlaced cliché of a father—can occasionally make conversations between characters seem a bit boring and pedestrian, but ultimately this isn’t really a movie about conflict. It’s about making the best of the hand you’re dealt and finding happiness by being honest with yourself and the people closest to you, even if the rest of society won’t accept you. A conveniently diverse cross-section of gay and lesbian characters experience this idea from completely different perspectives and the end result is both poignant and uplifting.

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